DSM system with an AGP card

DSM system with an AGP card

Hello,
First of all I wish to say this is a great eventforHPC systems. Now we can discuss ideas and problems together and help each other, also share knowledge. So I wish to congratulate all people who has partipication in bringing out this newsgroup.

As you know shared memory systems has greateasiness in programming up to distributed memory systems. but when it comes PC's it is difficult and ineffective to use this system.I want to ask if anybody think of agp bus as the communication bus between memory and the other computers. we dont need a graphics card in a hpc node you know. I think it is possible but a special I/O controller is needed in that card and a driver that shows the card as a memory add on card. I will open this subject in more detail if anybody is interested.
thank you and got speedy flops.

Thanks for your post. We are very pleased to have all of you on board with us in collaboration to make HPC better.

Using the AGP bus as an interconnect is an interesting idea. Unfortunately, it would ideally only allow one or maybe two links to other machines, and it would take much time to bring to fruition--butmaybe a great topic for future research, and maybe even a few PhD's. ;)

However, I am not sure that I would go about this, since it would merely be an excersise in academics. With the advent of PCI-Express* and the bandwidth's and latencies associated with it, this technology brings a whole new scalability and performance game to the table--not to mention the aspect of scales of economy due to future commoditization of it and the host channel adapters that will populate the slots and allow high speed, high bandwidths, and extremely low latencies to connect other nodes to the 'network'.

While messing with some host off-loading once, it was quickly discovered that while the write was very fast with AGP, none of the boards that we looked at had been optimized for reads. This makes sense since AGP is almost exclusive for graphics....